It is often desirable to coat plant materials for use in orally utilized compositions in order to improve the acceptability of the product to the consumer. There exists a need for such a coating to improve the “mouth feel,” taste, texture, appearance, smell, flavor and flavor delivery or other attributes of the plant material, and thereby make the product more acceptable to the user.
In particular, there exists a need to encapsulate plant materials, such as smokeless tobaccos, including chewing tobacco, dry snuff and moist snuff. Some users of chewing tobacco and/or snuff compositions notice certain negative flavor characteristics associated with bitterness, astringency, acridness, tobacco flavor, and aftertaste; thus there is perceived a need to treat the compositions with a variety of flavors to overcome the negative taste characteristics sometimes associated with them.